Prosecutions for nonviolent immigration offenses have hit an all-time high in fiscal year 2013, up 22.6 percent over five years, with offenses often involving illegal reentry. Meanwhile, critics of such prosecutions say the system is harming families.

About 93 percent of these prosecutions were associated with
people charged with offenses regarding illegal entry and reentry
into the US. Illegal reentry prosecutions have gone up 76 percent
under the Obama administration. The report has been compiled
using data provided by the US Department of Justice.

New cases were filed against 97,384 defendants in FY2013, which
ended on Sept. 30, amounting to 50 percent of all federal
criminal prosecutions.

The total of immigration prosecutions is up 5.9 percent from last
year, according to an analysis by the Transactional Records
Access Clearinghouse of information obtained via a Freedom of
Information Act request.

The Obama administration is on track to deport 2 million people
by 2014. About 97 percent of people being deported are Latino and
Caribbean, according to Tanya Golash-Boza, a sociologist at the
University of California, Merced.

Human Right Watch researcher Grace Meng says since deportees have
no legal way to return, many folks - often parents of US citizen
children - try repeatedly to reenter the US illegally. Some US
districts, she says, saw an estimated 80 to 90 percent of reentry
defendants that had US citizen relatives.

“One US district judge, Robert Brack in New Mexico, who has
sentenced over 11,000 people for illegal reentry, told me, ‘For
10 years now, I’ve been presiding over a process that destroys
families every day and several times each day,’” Meng writes.

Numerous protests against the rash of deportations
during Obama’s time in office have taken place nationwide.
Immigration activists have been organizing around the milestone
deportation number approaching. Many activists met in Phoenix in
October called the “#Not1MoreDeportation” conference, NBC
Latino reported.

“Imagine the president who promised immigration reform in 2008
and now as a result of his own policies, two million who would
have benefited from that reform have been expelled from the
country,” said B. Loewe, a spokesman for the National Day
Laborer Organizing Network, a group that organizes deportation
protests.

Despite an announcement in August by US Attorney General Eric
Holder on recalibrated nonviolent-criminal prosecutions and
reduced prison populations, no measures have emerged to curb
prosecution of immigration offenses.

On Monday, President Obama was interrupted during a speech in
California by activists urging him to use an executive order to
halt deportations rather than wait for congressional approval.

"Please use your executive order!" shouted the protester,
who was behind Obama on stage at the San Francisco event. "You
have the power to stop deportations!" he added.

"Actually, I don't," Obama said, waving off security
personnel aiming to remove the protester and others joining him.
"He can stay there…. I respect the passion of these young
people."

But then Obama told the protester shouting won’t make his goals
come to fruition: "If you're serious about making that happen,
then I'm willing to work with you.

"The easy way out is to try to yell and pretend like I can do
something by violating our laws. What I'm proposing is the harder
path" of amending the law, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Yet Obama has signed hundreds of executive orders, often labeled “executive
actions,” on a variety of issues, from gun control to
enforcing and implementing restrictions in the Patient Protection
and Affordable Care Act.

Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute told
FactCheck.org that Obama “does not hesitate to use executive
authority, but he is well within the mainstream of his modern
predecessors.”